#ucoms #socbiz This week, several IT industry blogs reported on the increased focus around unified communications as organizations embrace social computing in the workplace. In the first, IT Business Edge discusses in "Social Networking and Unified Communications: Catalysts for Change", the impact of unified communications on social business and cloud computing:

What Barlow is driving at is that it won’t be too long before all of these technologies combine to fundamentally change the way we all work.

The barriers to enterprise social software adoption are far more cultural than technical. Internal social networking tools make for great demos, but unified communications (UC) pros often struggle to define what problem enterprise social software is trying to solve.

IBM today announced new cloud-based collaboration services to help U.S.
Federal government organizations reap the benefits of social computing. The new set of social collaboration services, including IBM Sametime, delivered on IBM's Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)-compliant Federal Community Cloud, addresses the administration's drive to adopt a "cloud-first" policy which is designed to help the government improve its overall IT efficiency and delivery of services to citizens. By having Sametime as part of a FISMA-compliant environment, IBM is able to provide a roadmap for unified communications as a service for those organizations looking for FISMA-compliant delivery.

IBM Business Partners: please join us on Monday, July 18 for our second in our Living Social webcast series. Presented by Sandy Carter, VP IBM Social Business and Collaboration Solutions
Sales and Evangelism, and Rick Schonbrun, Worldwide Business Unit
Executive for Unified Communications and Collaboration, discuss with IBM and your peers about why IBMers, IBM Business Partners, and our customers are
using the IBM Unified Communications and Collaboration platform to socially connect employees across the enterprise, regardless
of geographic location.

Why Attend? We all need to LIVE social. Your customers and prospects expect you to live as, and not just talk about becoming, a social business. Living social earns you credibility with your customers and opens more doors. It's simple: live social, and close more business.

To accomodate multiple time zones, we have two sessions you can attend (PartnerWorld membership and registration is required):

#ucoms This week in Germany, IBM announced the district of Lüneburg (which includes 177,000 residents and the metropolitan region of Hamburg) is moving away from paper-based filing in favor of IBM's collaboration solutions. The district's administration is using Lotus Notes, Sametime and Quickr to help its employees collaborate in the office and on mobile devices. If you can read German, the IBM press release is now online.

I wanted to welcome a new blog to the IBM Collaboration Solutions family of blogs: the IBM Social Business Insights Blog. With this blog we hope to share news and thoughts on becoming a business that is engaged,
transparent and nimble. Join us in cultivating a spirit of collaboration
and community. You can also get to it by visiting the short URL for this blog:
http://ibm.com/blogs/socialbusiness.

As a reminder, other blogs we have include the IBM Collaboration Soapbox Blog (our Social Software blog), the Ed Brill Blog (the blog of our Director for Messaging and Collaboration, which includes Notes, Domino, Symphony and more), and coming soon, a new IBM Exceptional Web Experience blog and community.

Please join IBM and IBM Business Partner Polycom Tuesday June 21, 10am Pacific, for a free live webcast (registration required), "Becoming a Social Business with Unified Communication". In
this webinar, UCStrategies experts will
discuss how Unified Communications with visual collaboration help
medium-sized companies (100 - 1000 employees) achieve "Location
Liberation" and more effectively communicate both internally and
externally.

Before you listen in to IBM's social business announcement later at noon, listen in as IBM joins Plantronics earlier that morning, live at the New York Stock Exchange for a global webcast. Plantronics will be announcing the latest wave of groundbreaking audio solutions and our specially designed Enterprise Call control software plug in v2.0 for Sametime that further enhances IBM’s Social Business agenda .

Social Business has to be engaging. It is about connecting people in a way that is meaningful for all. Join Plantronics CEO Ken Kannappan -- supported by our very own Jeff Schick, Vice President of Social Software -- as they share insights into how businesses everywhere from anywhere can just simply communicate.

On May 18, Plantronics also celebrates 50 years of innovation (happy birthday!). Tune into Smarter Communications - Wednesday May 18, 10am EDT. Visit www.plantronics.com/launch to sign up for a reminder Webcast Event email.

And Plantronics has also introduced a Sounds for Sametime Plantronics Voice Pilot, new call control software, and has the latest UC headset for free – designed especially for Sametime and Sametime Unified Telephony. As my friend's aunt used to say: "Such a deal!".

Cleaning up through some leftover actions from the excellent Enterprise Connect 2011 event a month ago, I found some videos taken by our irrepressibly upbeat Brent Wolfe, Worldwide Business Development Executive for Unified Communications. He had the wherewithal to bring his portable video camera and captured a few IBM Business Partners showcasing their technologies on the Expo Show Floor. I just posted them to YouTube and embedded them here, in no particular order.

Whether you’re just thinking about deploying or just curious about the benefits
to your company, you’ll want to check out this Webcast from David Price of
Meridian IT. Meridian has been certified by the leading communications and
collaborations vendors such as Plantronics, IBM, Cisco, Tandberg, Radvision,
Shoretel and Polycom and has in-the-trenches experience with Sametime and SUT
roll-outs. This presentation will feature real world examples of what they’ve
seen and what you should know as a Lotus admin, voice architect, systems
engineer or IT manager. You’ll hear how IBM's offerings differ from traditional
telephony vendors and you’ll get first-hand tips on what you should expect when
working with system integrator. David will demonstrate ways to lower your
investment, improve collaboration, and enable your work force to operate
remotely with optimum productivity. Plus, you’ll come away with the knowledge to
effectively communicate the benefits of SUT to others in your company, including
your CFO.

As we blogged about way back in November 2010, unified communications is a core component of becoming a social business. And social media needs unified communications to help turn socializing into action. While we may have been ahead of the industry a little bit in making this connection explicit, much of the conversation at Enterprise Connect last week was dominated by Social Business and Social Media and how they're related to UC. Now comes this blog post from Carousel Connect as well, where they discuss IBM's social business initiative within the UC context. Whether you're trying to provide a more exceptional customer experience...

Now that you are listening more effectively, give [customers] more ways to interact with you. On-line chat and customer service
solutions integrated into your contact center are proven to substantially improve customer satisfaction levels. Providing customers with the types of social interactions and collaboration they have
become accustomed to will pay dividends both in cost savings and happier
customers.

...or an exceptional work experience...

An overlooked toolset in corporations is ‘Group Chat”. Many businesses
are bastions of “tribal knowledge” where a few employees know the
answers to problems that are asked over and over again. Setting up
“topic-based” group chat rooms (think Facebook-like simplicity) that
employees can join and which are moderated by internal
subject-matter-experts (SMEs), can speed reaction time and build up a
powerful knowledge base very quickly.

...what's important is that UC is placed within a broader context of collaboration in the enterprise.

What makes a successful solution ecosystem isn't just the vendor platform, of course, but the business partners that add value to that vendor's platform. In the case of IBM Unified Communications, we have over 400 business partners that make Sametime one of the leading unified communications platforms out there. Here's just a few of those business partners that happen to be exhibiting at Enterprise Connect this week. In addition to stopping by our own booth at 623, please stop by their booths to learn more about what they do, and how they work with IBM.